Reading and Writing Notebook Update

One of the best things that I did in my classroom was start using a Reading and Writing Notebook. Each of my students has a composition book that they use for this. In the fall we used just a regular spiral notebook that I got for each student, but I asked them to bring a new composition book for the spring semester. 

After all of my students brought one to class, we finally got them all put together. I actually changed them up quite a bit from last semester. I gave all of my students a label to put on their cover, but forgot to get a picture of it. It is real simple and nothing special.

The first thing that is in our notebooks is a Table of Contents. To be honest, we did a crummy job of keeping ours updated in the fall, but I am glad to say that we have done 100x better with it this semester. We are now up to page 20 on it as of today, and know we will have to add another page on top sooner rather than later. We use both the front and back of pages in the notebook too. 

Behind our table of contents you will find our "Word Collector". This idea comes from The Daily 5 and the The CAFE Book. When my students find an interesting word that they may not know, they add it to their list and can figure out what it means when they are at their Work on Words or Work on Writing station at a later time. 

Even though I teach 6th grade, I still feel that it is so important for my students to track their reading. I do not require them to read for a set amount of time each evening or anything, but they do have 15 minutes here, or 5 minutes there to read in class. When we start stations next week, they will also be required to go to the read to self station every day.

In the fall we took some very detailed notes on genres, so I decided to type it up for my friends. Boy were they glad I did that for them!

Each week my students are responsible for writing a Reading Response letter to me about the book that they are reading. This is a list of some ideas that they could write about in their notebook.

My district has spent a lot of money on Shelter Instruction training. We have to do things such as write content and language objectives each day, encourage students to speak in complete sentences, have word walls, etc. I personally do not mind it, but maybe that is because I am a new teacher. I almost always give my students (especially in my Inclusion and Regular class) a sentence stem to help them put their thinking into a complete sentence. This is a list of stems that they could use to help them write their reading response letters. 

This is something new that I started for the 2nd semester. We are doing DLR (Daily Language Review). Each day for their warm up, my 6th graders have 2 sentences to correct and a few questions about some skills we have learned. It has been the perfect way to get them focused first thing, and we are also able to review the skills that we have already learned. 

I knew my post could not be complete without a foldable in it. We use them all of the time in our notebooks. It really is such a great way to chunk the information together for my students. This is one that we did on Persuasive Techniques that we will be using throughout the 6 weeks while we are doing our persuasive unit.

Being that we are beginning Daily 5 stations in class on Monday, we have taken notes for each station this past week. This is what our notes page looked like for the Read to Self station. 

That is just a preview of what is in our notebooks so far this semester. I am hoping to do a weekly post on what we did in them that week. If you have any questions about them, please leave a question in the comments and I promise to answer them!